If you want to see the lens and pedestal

August 19, 2011 | Local News

Together again….The story of the reunion of the original
Hatteras lighthouse lens and pedestal

By KEVIN DUFFUS

Human genius, artistry, symmetry, craftsmanship, engineering elegance, perfection. These are just a few of the qualities that describe the recently restored, 19-foot-tall, 156-year-old Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Fresnel lens and pedestal that are together again at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.

The French invention was known by its 19th century caretakers as a classical illuminating apparatus of the first order. For mariners at sea it was simply known as “the light.” Viewed from 18 miles away, the five tons of glass, bronze, brass, iron, and steel were reduced to an ephemeral flash of yellow light providing a small measure of comfort and reassurance on a dark, unforgiving, and deadly ocean.

Today, the light no longer graces the lantern rooms of its two former lighthouses at Cape Hatteras, but it serves a new, no less vital, task as the singularly most remarkable and historic lighthouse artifact in America. It is a flawed but still beautiful Mona Lisa of Victorian-era industrial art.

And like the priceless DaVinci masterpiece, you can gaze upon the exhibit of the Henry-Lepaute & Company lens and pedestal almost endlessly and absorb the many stories it has to tell. It’s not just a light, but an oracle, if you will.

Some of the pedestal’s lost secrets began to be revealed in October, 2006, when the apparatus was dismantled for the first time in 136 years and recovered from the watch room in the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. In the summer of 2006, after much discussion, reflection, planning, and public comment, the National Park Service granted the museum’s request to reunite the pedestal with its lens. Since the pedestal and lens could no longer function as an aid-to-navigation, museum officials suggested that the artifacts could best be interpreted as a whole—the two components were engineered and built to operate as a single unit. The lens, loaned to the museum in 2002, had already been reconstructed and exhibited at the museum since the spring of 2005.
The work on the pedestal began the day after the lighthouse closed for the 2006 season.
Since its completion in 1870, countless people have ascended the 256 steps of the nation’s tallest lighthouse — dozens of keepers and their families, U.S. Lighthouse Service inspectors and engineers, Coast Guard lookouts during World War II, Park Service rangers and millions of adoring visitors. Rarest among them have been highly-skilled men known as “lampists.”

Lighthouse lampist Jim Woodward, of Cleveland, Ohio, was trained in the lost art by the last lampist of the old lighthouse service. It required every bit of Woodward’s 41 years of experience to figure out how to gently and safely coax the pedestal from the top of the lighthouse.

“From a technical and physical perspective, it was, by far, the most difficult challenge I’ve ever had to face as a lampist,” says Woodward.

Woodward’s predecessors, the U.S. Lighthouse Service lampists back in 1870, had the advantage of a stiff-leg derrick to hoist the lens and pedestal components to the top of the unfinished brick tower, weeks before the iron lantern room and roof were installed, enclosing the light. Lowering the pedestal back down the outside of the tower in a similar manner was not an available option.

Utilizing chain hoists, the tedious process of lowering each cast-iron component, some weighing upwards of 850 pounds, began by negotiating the narrow spiral staircase that descends from the watch room to the uppermost landing in the tower. Think of carrying furniture down a twisting, narrow flight of stairs. Woodward and his team, including Jim Dunlap and Kurt Fosburg, measured and re-measured clearances, calculated the geometry, and rehearsed every delicate ballet-like maneuver over and over.

But before the lowering could begin, the hundreds of French-milled fittings — bronze screws, nuts, and bolts — had to be loosened for the first time since 1870. Just about anyone who has had to take something apart, especially something old and residing in a marine environment, can appreciate the difficulty. A steady supply of penetrating oil was infused into the seams of the pedestal, and then Woodward’s crew waited — and waited. Eventually the 19th century fasteners began to turn, slowly at first, and the pedestal began to come apart, and so did its secrets.

One of the first revelations was that a small decorative foot rail that encircled the top of the pedestal was atypical among similar first-order apparatus seen by the modern day lampists.

“It suggests that this pedestal may have been exhibited at the Paris Exposition of 1850, the added embellishments a proud display of the manufacturer’s expertise,” said Woodward, as he stood in the empty lantern room with a 25-knot wind whistling through the open iron hatch to the upper gallery. If true, this fact adds to the historical significance of the artifact and increases its age by at least a couple of years.

A second discovery presented a darker, more malignant moment in the pedestal’s past.

To the trained eyes of the lampists, two things became evident. At some time on or before 1936, the lighthouse service installed a modification to the original pedestal machinery — a new, circular roadway on which the steel chariot wheels, supporting the 6,000-pound rotating lens, rolled. The modification covered the original roadway and its deformed indentations, which were carved by years of constant wear from the rolling wheels. But also detected was that something terribly wrong had occurred to the device not too long after, which appeared to have caused an unexpected yet catastrophic malfunction. Broken and bent teeth in the intricate gears of the clockwork mechanism indicated that possibly after the lighthouse service modification was made, the lens came to a jarring, grinding halt, permanently destroying the pedestal’s function. If it could not rotate, the light could not flash and the Cape Hatteras tower ceased being a lighthouse.

Was that the real reason, and not because of the threat of erosion, that the lighthouse was abandoned in 1936?

How could it have happened? One explanation suggests that the modified roadway appears to have elevated the machinery by an inch or two so that the gears no longer engaged precisely, causing them to be stripped when put into motion. Did the U.S. Lighthouse Service, during its waning years of professionalism and reputation for exacting standards, cause the destruction of its most famous light? Somewhere, possibly in a dusty government file, the truth might still be found.

Historical mysteries notwithstanding, the work of removing the pedestal progressed. Platen, decking, steps, diagonal arms and bull gear, doors, cabinet, stem, chariot assembly, clockwork case, clockwork gears, pinion gear, plates, and base –all components of the pedestal– were eventually lined up along the circular walls of the watch room, awaiting their trip down the tower. The clatter of the two-ton chain hoist reverberated loudly as each piece was lowered inch-by-inch from landing to landing down the 20-story building. Last to go was the heavy base, a casting not part of the original 1850 French pedestal first installed in the original lighthouse but forged purposely for the taller 1870 tower, boosting the height of the light’s focal plane by a necessary two feet.

But there was a problem. The base was too large to pass through the iron door below the watch room. For a moment, uncertainty –but not panic — gripped the modern-day lampists. Was the success of the entire pedestal project hinging on the obstinate base?

The solution was one employed by anyone moving an oversized object through a doorway –removal of the door’s hinges. It’s easier said than done, though, when the 300-pound iron door hangs on hinges with pins hammered into place 136 years ago. There was more penetrating oil, more waiting. But the persistence and patience of Woodward and his team paid off. The 850-pound base soon began its inch-by-inch journey down the inside of the tower.

During the ensuing two weeks, layers of surplus government gray paint were sandblasted away to prepare for a new coat of historically authentic, richly-colored forest green. Five panels of prisms, on display for years at the double keepers’ quarters and later in the Eastern National bookstore, were also relocated to the museum for inclusion in the exhibit. Then reassembly of the lens and pedestal began.

Another chapter in the long and tumultuous history of the magnificent Henry-Lepaute first-order illuminating apparatus was about to begin — hopefully a long and stable period of recognition, respect, and admiration.

Also during this time, some island residents who had years ago come into possession of prisms removed from the lens when the lighthouse stood abandoned during the 1940s, brought their artifacts to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum so that they may be returned to the incomplete framework of the great lens. One of those good citizens was Mary Elizabeth Gray of Buxton. During a recent interview, Gray recalled a happy time during her youth, when the lighthouse provided endless hours of enjoyment on lazy Sunday afternoons.

“I remember when my best friend, Patsy Brown, whose family lived in the keeper’s house while her father supervised the CCC camps, and I would dress up in her mother’s finest dresses, and we’d play in the lighthouse like it was our castle,” says Gray fondly of a time in the late ‘30s. “We would take each other’s dares and sometimes even ride on the lens as it turned. We called it our very own merry-go-round.”

And with that misty memory, Mary Elizabeth Gray may have helped to solve a mystery. Apparently, the lens was still able to rotate after the U.S. Lighthouse Service abandoned the tower in 1936. That means that the modified roadway added to the assembly is unlikely to have caused the destruction of the clockwork gears. It must have happened sometime later.

Indeed, a review of the records stored in the Commander’s office of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Fifth District Headquarters in Portsmouth, Va., reveal that as of September, 1943, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse Fresnel lens, chariot, and clockwork assembly were in “an excellent state of preservation” and “could be put in use in a short time by cleaning and oiling.”

A subsequent report, however, written just 13 months later, revealed that the most tragic chapter of the light’s intriguing past had begun. Even when Confederate and Union forces fought for possession of the Hatteras lens during the Civil War, it was well cared for, preserved intact, and largely undamaged.

But 80 years later, during a dark period after German U-boats no longer posed a threat during World War II and the lighthouse was left unattended, souvenir hunters began to ravage the lens, removing as many as 600 prisms, 24 bulls-eye lenses, and the incandescent oil-vapor lamp that was the heart of the light. Within four years, the Hatteras lens was destroyed.

It was sometime during this period that visitors to the lantern room who possessed a fair amount of strength – certainly not young girls — may have turned the lens with tremendous force, and then engaged the clockwork’s brake, violently ripping out most of the pinion gear’s roller bearings and breaking and bending the cogs of the clockwork gears. It was a shameful conclusion to the life of a machine that served in two lighthouses and was admired and cared for by generations of Hatteras lighthouse keepers and their families.

“It makes perfect sense,” Woodward said. “In retrospect, it’s the only way the clockwork and pinion gears could have been abused in such a way. The lack of wear following the installation of the new chariot wheel roadway initially made me suspect the lighthouse service engineers were at fault. But if the lens and clockwork were described by a Coast Guard officer in 1943 as being in an excellent state of preservation, the fault for the damage to the pedestal’s clockwork lies elsewhere.”

The historic artifact –indisputably a national treasure and an emblem of Hatteras Island’s storied traditions of lighthouse keeping and lifesaving — will never be as it once was.

But no matter. The lens and pedestal were miraculously rescued from the ravages of time, nature, and those who misguidedly claim a right to possess it. Its lost history has been rescued as well, and with luck, the light will tell its amazing story for generations to come.

(Kevin Duffus of Raleigh is an author, historian, and filmmaker. His books include “The Lost Light: The Mystery of the Missing Hatteras Fresnel Lens” and the recently published “Shipwrecks of the Outer Banks: An Illustrated Guide.”)